News tagged ‘exploit’

It's amazing, how curious some people are. iPhone hacker and data-forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski explained that iPhone snaps a screenshot of your most recent action -- regardless of whether it's sending a text message, e-mailing or browsing a web page -- in order to cache it. This is purely for aesthetic purposes: When an iPhone user taps the Home button, the window of the application you have open shrinks and disappears. In order to create that shrinking effect, the iPhone snaps a screenshot, Zdziarski said.

The phone presumably deletes the image after you close the application. But anyone who understands data is aware that in most cases, deletion does not permanently remove files from a storage device. Zdziarski demonstrated that if you know what you're doing (and you've got over an hour), you can recover the file system and see many, many of these grabs.

"This flaw can only be exploited by somebody with physical access to a device, but your phone could get into the hands of someone with more malicious intent," he said. "Obviously, you don't want to trust any of your data to a passcode."

Gadget Lab is also reporting that Zdziarski said forensics experts have actually used this method to solve serious crimes.

via gizmodo and gadget lab

The only way Apple can fix the exploit that the iPhone Dev Team has been using to Jailbreak iPhone’s and iPod Touch’s is to fix their hardware, but it seems Apple has figured out a way to program iTunes 8 to detect and prevent the Pwnage exploit. The screenshot below from iTunes 8 using a Pwned ipsw (with an unPwned device attached) is one example.

The Dev Team reacted promptly:

“The nice thing about iTunes decisions is that we can provide you with patches to counter them. We have one such patch already for Mac iTunes 8 for iPod touch. We’ll be working out the full suite of patches for all the combinations over the next week.”

Dev Team also published two interesting screenshots: